


A Long Long Time

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), F/M, Families of Choice, Gen, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 03:09:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18651667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Post-Endgame family-feels fic. Endgame spoilers.





	A Long Long Time

**Author's Note:**

> So guess who just saw Endgame and had a bunch of apocalypse feels.
> 
> I also don't really consider this the "main" Defenders timeline. As far as I'm concerned, they exist in a happily unSnapped timeline and always will. (I think it's reasonable to consider them not really part of the main timeline anyway; I think the Defenders shows are AU compared to the movies.) The apocalypse scenarios are interesting to explore in fic, but for the purposes of most of my Defenders fic, I'm just considering this version an apocalypse AU and not the main one.

When it happens, finally, Danny doesn't know yet. He's high in the mountains: meditating on a boulder, with the sun on his shoulders and the wind in the hair that's now grown long enough to fall past his shoulders.

For him, it's just another afternoon, on just another day in an endless series of days. He meditates long, in this quiet mountain meadow. Then he gets up and grabs his pack. He will need to look for a place to spend the night eventually: a hunter's cabin, a herder's house -- someone who could use the small services Danny can offer. But first he walks and walks, tiring himself enough that he hopefully can sleep without the dreams that have haunted him for five years.

Ward crumbling and blowing away on the wind. Trying and trying to call Colleen, getting no answer. The entire world falling into chaos around him, the tragedy and despair he's witnessed.

His life since that first awful day, five years of it, has alternated between trying his best to help, and just trying to ... deal. He's had Jeri's help at liquidating his assets and draining the Rand coffers to provide what help he can to a shattered world. The Rand billions are gone and there isn't much left of the company now, but what does he care about that? The money never mattered. It matters infinitely less now.

And so he travels, helping where he can. It's a world of infinite suffering: suffering on a personal level (families broken, children orphaned), and on a big-picture level too, with governments in disarray and infrastructure destroyed in those chaotic early moments when planes fell from the sky and power plants went offline and key industries lost the people necessary to keep them running.

But it's also a world with countless examples of people cooperating and helping each other. It's a world that is starting to rebuild, as Danny has slowly begun to rebuild himself.

It's been seven years now since he came back to New York angry and isolated, turning his back on one set of responsibilities, and then another, as he cast around for meaning. He found it in people, and then lost most of them, and all he can think now is that the only way he can honor their memory is by not doing it again. Not withdrawing from the world, no matter how much he might want to. As he did after Matt's (first, alleged) death, so he does now: he stays in touch with those left behind in New York -- Luke and Jessica, Jeri and Joy -- and he helps where he can, and he smiles at people and talks to people and doesn't _let_ himself shut down and pull away.

But sometimes he still needs to do what he's doing right now, and just ... go, get away from it all, escape into the woods for a time, out beyond cell phone coverage or people. For someone who used to hate being alone more than anything, he now ends up seeking it out more often than not. There's something in him that's still raw and bleeding, not yet scabbed over even after five years. And there are times when he wonders if what he's really doing is just trying not to deal with it, throwing himself into helping others because he can't save the ones that matter most.

But life goes on, and the world goes on. And sometimes you keep moving because you don't dare stop.

He walks and walks, and sleeps under a tree, and wakes to the sight of a deer browsing not too far away. For awhile he just lies there with his head pillowed on his arm, peaceful and still and perfectly in the moment, watching the deer as it grazes onward, clearly unaware of him.

It's in moments like this that he's happy, with no past or future, no regrets or guilt, just the sun and the grass and the deer.

And then he gets up and brushes the twigs out of his hair and starts walking back to civilization.

He finds a farm around sundown, and walks in prepared to offer handyman work in exchange for a place to stay the night, as is his custom. With half the world's population gone and nearly every family devastated by the loss of one or more members, most places like this are in desperate need of an extra set of hands. As always, he braces himself for what he might find: children trying to run the place alone, with all the adults in their lives dead; the elderly and the sick struggling on alone with their helpers gone; starving families whose entire herds, that they depended upon for their livelihood, vanished in an instant.

At least by this point, five years along, it's considerably less likely that he's going to walk into tragedy unawares. Abandoned farms are now overgrown, buried in weeds. It's not like those early days, when he often could do nothing except bury the dead and say a quiet prayer over their grave. (He still tries not to think about the babies.)

But this time, there's a party atmosphere at the farmhouse, and Danny finds himself welcomed in, a cup of clear local liquor shoved into his hands. He's not sure at first what they're celebrating, or why they're so happy. But slowly he manages to piece together, via the handful of words in the local language that he knows, that the young woman who looks barely out of her teens is actually the mother of the two children who look about as old as Danny was when his plane crashed in the Himalayas, and the other woman is _her_ mother, and they've both been away -- or, no --

Gone. Crumbled. Dusted.

They've come back.

 

*

 

Danny is sure, due to the part of him that doesn't dare believe in miracles (not now, not anymore), that he's misunderstanding something, that these people weren't really _gone_ gone, not the way everyone went away five years ago -- the way Colleen and Ward went away, the way Misty and Matt and Claire and Meghan and Albert and --

... like everyone back then went away, is the thing. It _can't_ be the same thing. People can still go missing and be presumed dead in the modern world. In fact, there was plenty of that in the chaotic early days, too. (He's not going to think about how long it took him to stop believing he'd find Colleen around the corner somewhere, on some street in New York; the time it took to stop looking at every face in the hope that it would be hers.)

Still, he's up and gone by first light, leaving the farmhouse behind, walking briskly down the rutted farm track, checking for cell coverage every time he stops for a rest or a drink. 

And then he comes to the nearest village, and it's chaos -- but happy chaos, mostly: hugging and laughter and a few random arguments between what he takes at first for cheating spouses and then realizes are actually spouses who married someone else after losing their first love.

Because it's true. There are more people in this village than there should be. Many more people -- and animals, and birds. Over the last five years he's become used to the silence and emptiness of a world missing most of its population. The village feels too crowded, bursting at the seams, overwhelming him.

And he needs to get somewhere that he can use his phone.

Because if _they're_ back ...

 

*

 

By the next morning (walking, running, hitching rides), he finally hits a place in the mountains where he gets phone reception, and texts pour in. Some are from friends back in New York. And there are eight from Colleen, and five from Ward.

Danny just sits, there at the edge of the road in the grass, because his legs won't hold him up anymore. His hands are shaking so hard that he ends up bringing up a random text, that he can barely read as it blurs in front of his eyes. It's Ward: _Danny, do you EVER check your FUCKING phone? Are you even alive?_

He holds the phone against his chest for a moment, and then he does something that he did for the last time two years ago, when he finally gave up hope.

He calls Colleen.

The phone rings only once, and then there's a voice he hasn't heard in five years, warm and affectionate and happy. "Danny!"

"Colleen," he says, and closes his eyes and sets his jaw and covers his face with his hand, and tries to cry without making a sound.

"Danny," she says again, in a very different voice. "God. Danny."

 

*

 

Colleen, as it turns out, just landed in Bangkok; she found out where Danny was, or at least the general part of the world, from Luke and Jessica. Ward -- who was already on this side of the world, in the same hillside meadow he'd disappeared from -- is meeting her there in a few hours.

"So I did the math and I guess you're five months older than me now," Ward says on the phone, as Danny leans against wooden cribbing in the back of a farm truck on the drive to the nearest airport and just grins at the sky. "Give or take a bit."

"That means you have to respect your elders," Danny says. His eyes are closed; he just wants to soak in the sound of Ward's voice. "Do you want me to teach you to say 'big brother' in Mandarin, so you can call me that?"

"I'm flipping you off right now, you just can't see it."

It's not actually that funny, but Danny laughs and laughs.

 

*

 

They're waiting for him at the Bangkok airport, both of them. They look exactly like he remembers. Ward is even wearing the same jacket, indelibly burned into Danny's memory from that instant when Ward turned to look at him in frozen shock and then crumbled away. But of course, they _would_ be the same. It's been five years for him, and no time at all for them.

Ward takes a step back to let Colleen hug him first, but Danny is having none of that. With one arm tightly wrapped around Colleen, he grabs a fistful of Ward's jacket and pulls him in, and just holds on, holds on, holds on to them both.

 

*

 

They end up on the terrace of a restaurant at sunset, and Danny realizes that he's _hungry,_ starving actually, for the first time in what feels like a very long time. They order a little of everything, and pull two tables together to spread plates out.

"So I see you decided to go full hippie while we were gone," Ward says, indicating Danny's general "eight days in the wilderness" look. "Can we assume that all the barber shops have been closed for the last five years?"

Colleen gives Ward a not-particularly-friendly look, making Danny realize that he had completely and utterly forgotten, or maybe never really noticed, the extent to which they don't get along. It's another thing that feels strangely frozen in time. While he's gone ahead and changed and lived, they haven't.

But it doesn't really matter. He doesn't even care. They're _back,_ they're alive, and he would have gone through five years or ten or twenty, through any kind of hell, to have that again. There's time to work out whatever needs to be worked out.

So much time. So much more time than he ever thought he'd have.

"It looks perfectly fine," Colleen says, running her hand through Danny's shoulder-length hair. She's been half leaning on him all evening, even though it hasn't been that long for her -- not as long as for him, anyway.

"Does that mean you want me to keep it?" Danny asks.

"Please, no," Ward says, reaching for his glass of water. "Colleen, give me some backup here."

"I think it's up to you, Danny," Colleen says, leaning her head against his shoulder. "It's your hair."

"That means she hates it," Ward says over the rim of his water glass. Danny can feel Colleen twitch against him, and Ward seems to realize he's working her last nerve, because he clears his throat and says quickly, "You know, I just realized that if the date is right, my birthday's in a month. But I just had one a few months ago. So do we count it, or not?"

"I dunno, you want to be older again?" Danny asks. "For another few months, anyway."

"That's weird," Colleen says slowly. "He's right, my birthday is off by a couple of months now, too. And I wonder what's happened to the dojo while I've been gone."

"It's fine," Danny says. "Jessica's living there right now. Long story. But it's okay. The company, uh ..." He gives Ward an apologetic look. "I kinda spent most of the money and sold almost everything off to get more."

"Spent it on _what?_ We're talking billions of dollars here!"

"Mostly things like feeding people," Danny says, and he feels Colleen petting his arm, while Ward looks both irritated and slightly guilty.

"Well, it's not like _I've_ been doing much with the company lately," Ward says after a minute. "I mean, lately as of five years ago. Who cares. Maybe it's time to do something else with my life. ... You know, I talked to Joy yesterday. She was genuinely civil, possibly even, dare I say it, pleasant. Her company's doing well. I think it's possible that if I brought it up with her, she might ..."

"Give you a job?" Colleen says, but her tone is teasing.

"Take me on as a _partner,"_ Ward retorts. He pauses; a look of soft wonder crosses his face. "Do you know, I have a four and a half year old daughter now? Danny, you're an uncle."

"I know," Danny says. "I've stayed in touch with Bethany."

"Of course you have." But Ward sounds grateful.

"I have pictures on my phone. I'll show them to you later."

"A lot changes in five years, doesn't it?" Colleen's head doesn't move from Danny's shoulder, but he feels her shrug. "I don't know what I'm going to do with my life in the short term. Funny thing about not showing up to your job for five years, you tend not to have a job when you come back."

"There's going to be a lot to fix, you know," Danny says seriously. "All of this, people coming back -- it's not just pure, unadulterated good. Everyone's moved on, or tried to. There aren't jobs for everybody. There aren't houses. Lots of people have died in the last five years, which is going to hit their returning relatives hard." He pauses briefly, thinking about it the other way around: waking from one moment to the next to discover that while no time at all has passed for him, it's been five years for everyone else, and in those intervening years, Colleen or Ward or someone else he loves has died for real --

But he stops himself, forces the thoughts away. It's not like that. They're _here,_ and he grounds himself in the moment. Perfect happiness. That's what this is.

Into the silence, Colleen says, "Well, we fix things. That's what we do, right?"

_We._

Danny wraps his hand around hers, unable to speak, and Colleen laces their fingers together. And then Danny lifts their linked hands and holds them out to Ward, eyebrows raised in a question.

Ward looks exasperated, rolls his eyes, and looking slightly embarrassed about it all, reaches out to bump their combined fist with his own.


End file.
